Sino peripatético: On Transnational Lives / Sobre las vidas transnacionales by Daniel Campos
Tuesday September 26, 2023 at 6:00 PM

Online via Zoom, pre-registration required:
https://brooklyn-cuny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwrcuuvrjIjGNHA5WXfos6Qp9uEvE-pioK5 

Daniel Campos's philosophical memoir Sino peripatético (New York: Sudaquia Editores, 2023) will serve as the starting point for a conversation on the transnational lives of people who, in the Americas and globally, are no longer emigrants or immigrants but "peripatetics." The speakers will be Daniel Campos, Yagersys Laya, Wilson Jachero, Sergio Gallegos, Ignacio Carvajal. The event will be held online in Spanish with simultaneous English-language translation.
 

American Born: An Immigrant Story, A Daughter’s Memoir by Rachel M. Brownstein
Thursday October 12, 2023 at 11:00 AM

Woody Tanger Auditorium, Brooklyn College Library 

This event celebrates the publication of Rachel M. Brownstein's new book American Born: An Immigrant Story, A Daughter’s Memoir (University of Chicago Press, 2023). Brownstein, Professor Emerita, English at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, will be joined in conversation by Allan Amanik, Associate Professor and Chairperson Department of Judaic Studies, Brooklyn College. The book is an incisive memoir of Brownstein’s seemingly quintessential Jewish mother, a resilient and courageous immigrant in New York. A distinguished biographer and critic, Brownstein began writing about her mother Reisel during the Trump years, dwelling on the tales she told about her life and the questions they raised about nationalism, immigration, and storytelling. For most of the twentieth century, Brownstein’s mother gracefully balanced her identities as an American and a Jew. Her values, her language, and her sense of timing inform the imagination of the daughter who recalls her in her own old age. The memorializing daughter interrupts, interprets, and glosses, sifting through alternate versions of the same stories using scenes, songs, and books from their time together.

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Migration as Economic Imperialism by Immanuel Ness
Thursday October 19, 2023 at 12:30 PM

Woody Tanger Auditorium, Brooklyn College Library

This event celebrates the publication of Immanuel Ness’s latest book, Migration is Economic Imperialism: How International Labour Mobility Undermines Economic Development in Poor Countries (Polity, 2023). Ness, Professor and Chairperson of Political Science, is joined in conversation by colleague Corinna Mullen. In the book, Ness makes a sharp corrective to conventional wisdom by arguing that temporary labor migration represents the most recent form of economic imperialism and global domination. A closer look at the economic and social evidence demonstrates that remittances deepen economic exploitation, unravel societal stability and significantly expand economic inequality between poor and rich societies. The book exposes the damaging political, economic and social effects of migration on origin countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and how border and security mechanisms control and marginalize low-wage migrant workers, especially women and youth. Ness asserts that remittances do not bring growth to poor countries but extend national dependence on the export of migrant workers, leading to warped and unequal development on the global periphery.
 

The Lights: Poems by Ben Lerner
Thursday, October 26, 2023 at 2:15 PM  

Room 411, Brooklyn College Library

The event celebrates the publication of Ben Lerner’s latest book, The Lights: Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023).  Lerner, Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, will be joined in conversation by David Grubbs, Distinguished Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, and Celina Su, Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies and Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center. Lerner's beautiful book, The Lights, is a constellation of verse and prose, voice mails and vignettes, songs and felt silences, that brings the personal and the collective into startling relation. Sometimes the scale is intimate, quiet, and sometimes the poems are sweeping, Orphic experiments in the animation of our common world. Written over a span of fifteen years, The Lights registers the pleasures, risks, and absurdities of making art and family and meaning against a backdrop of interlocking, accelerating crises, but for all their insight and critique, Lerner’s poems ultimately communicate―in their unpredictability, in their intensities―the promise of mysterious sources of lift and illumination. 

Revolutionary Feminists by Barbara Winslow
Thursday November 2, 2023 at 12:50 PM

Woody Tanger Auditorium, Brooklyn College Library

This event celebrates the recent publication of Barbara Winslow’s Revolutionary Feminists: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Seattle (Duke University Press, 2023). Winslow, (Professor in Secondary Education and Women’s and Gender Studies) is joined in conversation by Professor Zinga Fraser (Africana Studies and Director of the Shirley Chisholm Project. The book tells the story of the radical women’s liberation movement in Seattle in the 1960s and 1970s from the perspective of a founding member, Barbara Winslow. Drawing on her collection of letters, pamphlets, and photographs as well as newspaper accounts, autobiographies, and interviews, Winslow emphasizes the vital role that Black women played in the women’s liberation movement to create meaningful intersectional coalitions in an overwhelmingly White city. Winslow brings the voices and visions of those she calls the movement’s “ecstatic utopians” to life. She charts their short-term successes and lasting achievements, from organizing women at work and campaigning for subsidized childcare to creating women-centered rape crisis centers, health clinics, and self-defense programs. The Seattle movement was essential to winning the first popular vote in the United States to liberalize abortion laws. Despite these achievements, Winslow critiques the failure of the movement's White members to listen to Black, Latina, Indigenous, and Asian American and Pacific Islander feminist activists. Reflecting on the Seattle movement’s accomplishments and shortcomings, Winslow offers a model for contemporary feminist activism.

Sylvester’s Letter: Collaboration and Creative Process in Picture Books
a conversation with Matthew Burgess and Josh Cochran, Claudia Bedrick, and Roni Natov

Tuesday November 14, 2023 at 11AM

Room 411, Brooklyn College Library

In celebration of Prof. Matthew Burgess's new book, Sylvester’s Letter, we host an exploration of creative collaboration and process, word and image in picture books. The book is a “adventurous, expressive, heartfelt story about the tremendous role played by creativity across life and death” (Enchanted Lion Books, 2023). For this event, Prof. Burgess is joined in conversation by Josh Cochran, his co-author and illustrator, Claudia Bedrick, Enchanted Lion Books editor and publisher, and Prof. Roni Natov, his colleague from the English Department. 

Gender and Power in Strength Sports: Strong as Feminist
a conversation with Katie Rose Hejtmanek, Melissa Forbis, Noelle Brigden, and Cara Ocobok

Tuesday November 28, 2023 at 6PM

Online via Zoom, pre-registration required:
https://brooklyn-cuny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAqfuyorDgoGdS-tbaAlEGZLk2zJFIPa0Vb 

To celebrate the publication of their new book Gender and Power in Strength Sports: Strong as Feminist (Routledge, 2023), editors Kathie Rose Hejtmanek and Melissa Forbis, Brooklyn College, are joined in conversation by their co-editor Noelle Brigden, Marquette University, and by Cara Ocobok, Notre Dame University. Drawing together interdisciplinary work, the book argues that in the face of ongoing embodied precarity, strength sports have become a complex form of both resistance to, and reproduction of, patriarchy. This argument also challenges traditional understandings and definitions of “strength.” Covering recreational-level participation and elite athletics, across experiential/individual, local, national, transnational, and global scales, the book explores diverse topics such as the pregnant strength athlete, the status of trans women in strength sports, and the gendered dimensions of online fitness communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. In so doing, it traces power dynamics and the interplay among multiple oppressions.